Papers by Zhuang Ma
SelF-Eval: Self-supervised Fine-grained Dialogue Evaluation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics are expensive and easy to conduct but ineffective to reflect dialogue quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised fine-grained dialogue evaluation framework which can automatically assign fine-granular scores for arbitrarily dialogue data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is highly consistent with human evaluations and better than the state-of-the-art models. |
Meta-rater: A Multi-dimensional Data Selection Method for Pre-training Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Xinlin Zhuang, Jiahui Peng, Ren Ma, Yinfan Wang, Tianyi Bai, Xingjian Wei, Qiu Jiantao, Chi Zhang, Ying Qian, Conghui He
| Challenge: | composition of pre-training datasets for large language models remains undisclosed . current methods for evaluating data quality are limited by single-dimensional evaluation or redundancy-focused strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional data selection method that integrates dimensions with existing quality metrics through learned optimal weightings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method doubles convergence speed for 1.3B model models and improves downstream task performance by 3.23%. |
VOLTA: Improving Generative Diversity by Variational Mutual Information Maximizing Autoencoder (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | generative diversity is a critical yet underexplored issue in natural language generation . previous approaches to enhance diversity of Transformer models have been limited by their latent variables . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that bridges Transformer with VAE to enhance generative diversity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves generative diversity while maintaining generative quality. |
Sparkle: Mastering Basic Spatial Capabilities in Vision Language Models Elicits Generalization to Spatial Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yihong Tang, Ao Qu, Zhaokai Wang, Dingyi Zhuang, Zhaofeng Wu, Wei Ma, Shenhao Wang, Yunhan Zheng, Zhan Zhao, Jinhua Zhao
| Challenge: | Currently, vision-language models excel in many downstream tasks but struggle with spatial reasoning, which is crucial for navigation and interaction with physical environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that generates synthetic data to provide targeted supervision for VLMs across these basic spatial capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework disentangles 2D spatial reasoning into three core components: direction comprehension, distance estimation, and localization. |
VISA: Retrieval Augmented Generation with Visual Source Attribution (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to retrieval-augmented generation primarily link generated content to document-level references, making it difficult for users to locate evidence among multiple content-rich retrieved documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach that combines answer generation with visual source attribution by leveraging large vision-language models to identify evidence and highlight exact regions that support the generated answers with bounding boxes in the retrieved document screenshots. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach identifies evidence and highlights exact regions that support the generated answers with bounding boxes in the retrieved document screenshots. |
PromptReps: Prompting Large Language Models to Generate Dense and Sparse Representations for Zero-Shot Document Retrieval (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) excel in zero-shot document ranking tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-based re-ranking method that requires no further training but is only feasible for reranking a handful of candidates due to computational costs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can retrieve documents from the entire corpus without training and with a large amount of paired text data. |
Astra: Efficient Transformer Architecture and Contrastive Dynamics Learning for Embodied Instruction Following (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing vision-language-action models rely on causal attention for processing sequences composed of interleaved segments from different modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a Transformer architecture featuring trajectory attention and learnable action queries that efficiently process segmented multimodal trajectories and predict actions for imitation learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture performs better on three large-scale robot manipulation benchmarks than previous models. |
RewardDS: Privacy-Preserving Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models via Reward Driven Data Synthesis (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jianwei Wang, Chengming Shi, Junyao Yang, Haoran Li, Qianli Ma, Huiping Zhuang, Cen Chen, Ziqian Zeng
| Challenge: | Existing solutions to fine-tune large language models for domain-specific tasks are ineffective in addressing privacy concerns. |
| Approach: | They propose a privacy-preserving framework that fine-tunes a reward proxy model and uses reward signals to guide the synthetic data generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework fine-tunes a reward proxy model and uses reward signals to guide the synthetic data generation. |
UI-Copilot: Advancing Long-Horizon GUI Automation via Tool-Integrated Policy Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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Zhengxi Lu, Fei Tang, Guangyi Liu, Jin Ma, Kaitao Song, Xu Tan, Wenqi Zhang, Weiming Lu, Jun Xiao, Yueting Zhuang, Yongliang Shen
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that UI-Copilot-7B achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging MemGUI-Bench, outperforming strong 7B-scale GUI agents such as GUI-Owl-7B and UITARS-1.5-7B. |
| Approach: | They propose a collaborative framework where the GUI agent focuses on task execution while a lightweight copilot provides on-demand assistance for memory retrieval and numerical computation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms GUI-Owl-7B and UI-TARS-1.5-7B on MemGUI-Bench and delivers 17.1% improvement on AndroidWorld over the base Qwen model. |
Audio-centric Video Understanding Benchmark without Text Shortcut (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yudong Yang, Jimin Zhuang, Guangzhi Sun, Changli Tang, Yixuan Li, Peihan Li, Yifan Jiang, Wei Li, Zejun Ma, Chao Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) focus on visual abilities, but audio is essential for video understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose an audio-centric video understanding benchmark to evaluate video comprehension capabilities of multimodal LLMs with a particular focus on auditory information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed video understanding benchmarks evaluate video comprehension capabilities of multimodal models with a particular focus on auditory information. |
BrowseComp-Plus: A Fair and Disentangled Evaluation Benchmark for Deep Search Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Zijian Chen, Xueguang Ma, Shengyao Zhuang, Ping Nie, Kai Zou, Sahel Sharifymoghaddam, Andrew Liu, Joshua Green, Kshama Patel, Ruoxi Meng, Mingyi Su, Yanxi Li, Haoran Hong, Xinyu Shi, Xuye Liu, Hosna Oyarhoseini, Nandan Thakur, Crystina Zhang, Luyu Gao, Wenhu Chen, Jimmy Lin
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for deep search agents rely on blackbox web search APIs . dynamic and opaque web APIs hinder reproducibility and fair comparisons - authors . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that employs a fixed corpus for controlled retrieval for deep search agents. |
| Outcome: | The new benchmark shows that agents that combine large language models with retrieval tools excel at complex, reasoning-intensive queries. |
Noise Contrastive Estimation and Negative Sampling for Conditional Models: Consistency and Statistical Efficiency (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Conditional models are frequently encountered in practice, but there has not been a rigorous theoretical analysis of NCE in this setting. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a ranking-based and ranking-only method for conditional models to estimate parameter estimates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method avoids calculation of partition function or derivatives at each training step . it is closely related to negative sampling methods, now widely used in NLP . |
Few-shot In-context Learning on Knowledge Base Question Answering (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | KB-BINDER enables few-shot in-context learning over knowledge base questions . KBQA is a difficult problem due to the heterogeneity of knowledge bases . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables few-shot in-context learning over KBQA tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can outperform state-of-the-art models on GraphQA and MetaQA datasets. |
ItiNera: Integrating Spatial Optimization with Large Language Models for Open-domain Urban Itinerary Planning (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Yihong Tang, Zhaokai Wang, Ao Qu, Yihao Yan, Zhaofeng Wu, Dingyi Zhuang, Jushi Kai, Kebing Hou, Xiaotong Guo, Jinhua Zhao, Zhan Zhao, Wei Ma
| Challenge: | Existing urban itinerary planning studies focus on traditional tourism, but they lack the precision and accuracy needed to create a personalized itinerary. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-domain urban itinerary planning system that integrates spatial optimization with large language models to provide customized urban itineraries based on user needs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can generate personalized urban itineraries based on user needs and scale with existing methods. |
Learning From the Source Document: Unsupervised Abstractive Summarization (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for abstractive summarization are under supervised training, but obtaining high-quality and large-scale datasets for supervised learning is laboriously difficult. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised method that leverages contrastive learning to generate summaries by rewriting and paraphrasing the source documents to generate good summary. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on extensive experiments on source documents and fake documents. |
ED2LM: Encoder-Decoder to Language Model for Faster Document Re-ranking Inference (2022.findings-acl)
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Kai Hui, Honglei Zhuang, Tao Chen, Zhen Qin, Jing Lu, Dara Bahri, Ji Ma, Jai Gupta, Cicero Nogueira dos Santos, Yi Tay, Donald Metzler
| Challenge: | State-of-the-art neural models typically encode document-query pairs using cross-attention for re-ranking. |
| Approach: | They propose to fine tune a pretrained encoder-decoder model using document to query generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable results to more expensive approaches while being 6.8X faster. |
Multimodal Self-Instruct: Synthetic Abstract Image and Visual Reasoning Instruction Using Language Model (2024.emnlp-main)
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Wenqi Zhang, Zhenglin Cheng, Yuanyu He, Mengna Wang, Yongliang Shen, Zeqi Tan, Guiyang Hou, Mingqian He, Yanna Ma, Weiming Lu, Yueting Zhuang
| Challenge: | Using large language models, large multimodal models struggle with basic tasks like reading time from a clock and planning a route using a road map. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal self-instruct that synthesizes massive abstract images and visual reasoning instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model synthesizes 11,193 abstract images and reasoning instructions across eight visual scenarios. |